The e-mail that I am reproducing below has just been disseminated by “Making Change at Walmart,” the employee organization that is trying to pressure Walmart into providing more of its employees with living wages and decent benefits. It serves to reinforce my ongoing complaints about the Obama administration’s seeming obliviousness to the messages that it…
During the NCAA men’s basketball season, the Kansas Jayhawks were losing to their arch-rivals, the Missouri Tigers. Ostensibly to inspire the team, a female KU fan took a “selfie” of her considerable cleavage and posted it at #KUBOOBS. The KUBOOBS website (so, yes, the tweet quickly became a website; who could have predicted that that…
Yes, some charter schools, especially those run by non-profit foundations, are excellent and ought to be acknowledged for that excellence. But to declare that this week is National Charter Schools Week, as the Obama administration has done, not only ignores the often dismal performance of corporate charter schools—the sham that they provide any sort of…
The Huffington Post recently ran an item listing the “ten weirdest college clubs.” I think that the word “odd” is more appropriate in this case, for “weird” has associations with perversity (though not just sexual perversity) and strange obsessions and these clubs seem, for the most part, to be much more whimsical. The clubs include:…
The motto of Bryan College is “Christ Above All.” The college, which has an enrollment of between 700 and 800, was originally named William Jennings Bryan College, after the thrice unsuccessful presidential candidate who became a special co-counsel for the prosecution in the Scopes Trial. In addition to “Free Silver,” the “Great Commoner,” as Bryan…
All nations, and this seems especially true of great nations, have paradoxes at the core of their national characters that define them. The tensions within these paradoxes are alternately, or in times of crisis simultaneously, a dynamic source of national strength and also an anarchic source of national turmoil. In the United States, these paradoxes…
At the end of the 2013-2014 academic year, total outstanding student debt in the United States is estimated to be $1.08 trillion. About.com, which is quoting information provided in U.S. Treasury reports [http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/moneymatters/ss/How-Much-US-Debt-Does-China-Own.htm], provides the following overview of who holds U.S. government debt: “About 32 cents for every dollar of U.S. debt, or $4.6 trillion,…